Drone Copter Flops Half Its Missions; Navy Still Wants More

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Drone Copter Flops Half Its Missions; Navy Still Wants More

The Navy absolutely loves its robotic helicopter. In Latin American waters, the copter hovers above suspected drug smugglers to alert Navy ships about illicit cargo. The Pentagon is dead set on purchasing way more of them. Only one problem: the copter isn't that hot at what's supposed to be its primary task: surveillance. During a recent tour on *U.S.S. Halyburton, *the Fire Scout robocopter only managed to complete 54 percent of its missions.

Northrop Grumman's MQ-8B Fire Scout is a spy drone that can lift off from a ship's deck. Its modular suite of cameras, sensors and radar allow the Navy to customize it to collect the intelligence that sailors want relayed back to station. Though it took a long time to find its purpose, the Fire Scout's ability to take off and land on a moving ship make it undeniably attractive to the Navy, though it's not cheap: each copter costs $9 million. (A Predator costs $20 million for four planes, a ground control station and a satellite link.)

But Fire Scout doesn't make any sense if it can't get its intelligence back to the ship ASAP. And that's the problem, according to the Pentagon's testing chief.

The Fire Scout can't be trusted to "provide time-sensitive support to ground forces," assessed Michael Gilmore, the Defense Department's director of test and evaluation, in a June 24 report obtained by InsideDefense. Its data links are "fragile." Launches get delayed because of the time it takes to get the Fire Scout talking to the ground control station. In other words, if you use the Fire Scout for intel, get ready to wait... and wait... and wait for your imagery.

Yet the Navy is stuck on the Fire Scout. It asked Congress this year to increase funding by $46 million and requested to nearly double its purchases to 57 of the copters. It sent Fire Scouts to Afghanistan to hunt for homemade bombs. The next big idea is to send Fire Scouts out with SEALs – who already have access to a different kind of spy drone.

What's more, Northrop is already looking to upgrade the drone to the Fire-X, which will increase the copter's flight time, payload and speed. Only one problem there: "97 percent of its software is rehosted" on the Fire-X, Northrop's George Vardoulakis boasted at a Navy confab in April. After Gilmore's report, that sounds more like a liability than a virtue.